Tag: Gentleness

Making friends with ourselves

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The ninth Karama, a sixteenth-century meditation master, wrote of a “reverse meditation”, in which we recognize thoughts as they occur and regard them as friends. This “reverses” the tendency to regard thoughts as distractions from the main focus; now the thoughts themselves are the main focus. Mindfulness-of-mind practice is a further step on the path of making friends with ourselves. This is the heart of awareness practice: making friends with our entire being as a stepping stone to embracing our world.

Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness

Learning from nature: the seasons cannot be hurried

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File:Flickr - don macauley - A lamb in the mists.png

If you cultivate patience, you almost can’t help cultivating mindfulness, and your meditation practice will gradually become richer and more mature. If you really aren’t trying to get anywhere else in this moment,  patience  takes care of itself. It is a remembering that things unfold in their own time. The seasons cannot be hurried. Spring comes, the grass grows by itself. Being in a hurry usually doesn’t help and it can create a great deal of suffering. Patience is an ever-present alternative to the mind’s endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself)  or something for it. From the perspective of patience, things happen because other things happen. Nothing is separate and isolated

Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are

Photo by Donald Macauley

Kindness towards oneself

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Instead of mercilessly judging and criticizing yourself for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings – after all, who ever said you were supposed to be perfect? You may try to change in ways that allow you to be more healthy and happy, but this is done because you care about yourself, not because you are worthless or unacceptable as you are. Perhaps most importantly, having compassion for yourself means that you honor and accept your humanness.  Things will not always go the way you want them to.  You will encounter frustrations, losses will occur, you will make mistakes, bump up against your limitations, fall short of your ideals.  This is the human condition, a reality shared by all of us. The more you open your heart to this reality instead of constantly fighting against it, the more you will be able to feel compassion for yourself and all your fellow humans in the experience of life.

 Kristin Neff

The language we use

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Are we using a language in our mind, which is tentative, soft and open or are we using a language which is harsh, strict and compulsive? We will feel differently if in our mind we are saying repeatedly, ‘I must, they must, it has to be, it cannot happen, they should, he never, she always’. The more we use this kind of language internally, the more we will feel tension and rigidity, especially if things do not go according to plan. If instead we were to use more tentative language like ‘I could, he possibly, it might, they sometimes’ we then would encounter reality and circumstances with a more open and creative attitude. We would be open to things going one way, but also happening in a different manner as well. Experience the difference you feel if you think ‘I must go to see this concert’ to ‘I could go to this concert’. With the first version you will fight and strain so that it must happen at all costs. With the second one you are open to it and will rejoice if it happens but if it does not, it will be fine. We can be so stressed by minor things but if we could bring less grasping to our thinking process, we would better evaluate what is essential and not so essential.

Martine Bachelor

Editing ourselves

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One of  the members of our group worked as an editor for a local magazine. She arrived often carrying bundles of page proofs from her still-unfinished work at the office. One wintry evening she was the first to speak: “It’s like we’re all trying to be editors over our emotions. We look ourselves over and decide what gets to stay and what has to go. We move from first drafts to smoothly polished paragraphs by crossing out certain grammatical mistakes and supplementing the weaker parts of the prose. When it comes to feelings and meditation, we’re all desperately trying to edit ourselves for improvement!“

Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness

A relaxed approach

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Why do you focus so hard when you meditate?
Do you want something?
Do you want something to happen?
Do you want something to stop happening?
Check to see if one of these attitudes is present.
The meditating mind should be relaxed and at peace.
You cannot practise when the mind is tense.

Sayadaw U Tejaniya, Right Attitude